Thursday, September 25, 2008

That's what the guy from PG&E said to me when he showed up this morning!! On their THIRD day in a row of work on this one day job..

This meter actually showed up last night. Just barely.

After recalling everyone he'd called the night before Dan finally got hold of a supervisor who put us back on the schedule BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T PLANNING ON COMING BACK/sigh

Then he got a call that they were going to be there sometime after 4:30, so he rushed home from work to wait and wait and wait. At about 7:30 a guy showed up, but he didn't have a meter! He said he needed to run and get supplies and that he'd be back.

By about 8:30 we were pretty sure we were in for another night without hot water, but sure enough, he came back with the meter shortly after that. After he installed the meter he came through the house and checked all the gas appliances in the house. And by all I mean he lit the hot water heater and checked the dryer.. he was a little thrown by the propane camp stove sitting on top of the dryer, but everything checked out and we took hot showers!

But not everything was done. The line from the street to the meter was still the smaller, original size, thus defeating the entire purpose of having touched it at all.

This morning, the speaker of that fabulous quote showed up to swap out the line between the valve just past the sidewalk We weren't about to rip up the newly poured sidewalk again, plus, the valve was where the valve was.. they have no way to shut the gas off between the street and that valve so all of this was always about the run of pipe between the valve and the meter.

When I left for work he was grumbling about how he was going to weld in that trench, and when I came home the trench was filled back in again! just to the level of the pipe, of course.

I'd give them the benefit of the doubt to say it was filled in for safety.. since the trench was about 8" deeper than the level of the pipe, if someone fell into the pit and landed on the pipe there'd be no support for it floating in air, and it's likely it could snap. Which would be bad.Had we not already dug up the incorrect work that had been covered up, I would be much more inclined to think that safety was the reason. As it was, it just meant we had to dig up the dirt AGAIN.

Here it is. Here's what all the fuss was about. On the right you can see the bigger yellow pipe, but for some reason there's a length of smaller pipe between that and the valve. After another hour on the phone with supervisors it was determined that everything was the correct size and the job was officially done (this was determined by them telling us this..), so I guess that's that.

We can finally fill the trench back in for good and I can start putting down a path so it's not a muddy mess every time it rains.